TMILN's 100 Favourites - 100

100. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
Dir: Blake Edwards
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Buddy Ebsen, Patricia Neal, Martin Balsam

A struggling writer and a free-spirited call-girl start an affair but reality seems destined to get in the way.

As iconic roles go there are few to rival Audrey Hepburn’s turn as Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. The film would have been a very different experience had Marilyn Monroe been cast as originally planned. Truman Capote, on whose story the movie is based, wanted Monroe but surely she would have been too overt, too ‘Marilyn’ for the film to work in this era of Hollywood. Most of the more salacious aspects of the book were toned down or removed but what remains is an excellent picture with two distinct halves. The first is fairly care free and light as the romance between neighbours begins and we see into Holly’s lifestyle of parties, late nights and the most famous ‘walk of shame’ ever. However, as the story progresses both characters have to face up to the aspects of their lives that they would like to ignore or they thought had been consigned to history’s dustbin. With the regrettable exception of Mickey Rooney as a Japanese pervert, everyone is on good form here, particularly Hepburn who moves from free-spirited to haunted without losing the basic core of the character.